Oxford: Hands-On Science!

Ping! You had one new email. It said: “Not sure that you’d be interested, but you’ll be in Oxford that week so I thought maybe you’d want to do one of the days”.

From its title, “New OxHOS Society“, I was expecting the email to be just another advert for just another society, but the sender knew me well enough to know I’d be hooked. It read:

Do you love science? Oxford Hands-On Science (OxHOS) is a group of students seeking to spread our enthusiasm for science by taking interactive, Hands-On experiments to schools and public venues. We want to show the public that science is awesome and inspire the next generation of scientists.

I’m so happy I didn’t miss that email.

Of course, I decided to join. Soon I was sitting with other students – mostly chemists, mathematicians, engineers and biologists of all sorts – at a training workshop, discussing how to communicate science in different scenarios. For example how do you talk about science to kids? What if they are joined by their parents? Do you make it all sound simple enough for a 4-year-old to understand? What is fair to expect someone to know? Do you want to teach them or entertain them? How far should you explain a scientific concept and how far should you let the audience discover themselves?  These are all questions that I often ask myself but this time discussed in a group, all pointing towards a specific goal: to make more people excited about science. Soon we were ready to put our learning in to practice.

The OxHOS Roadshow lasted for a week, during which time we visited three schools, as well as the East Oxford Community Centre and the Templars Square Shopping Centre in Cowley. I had the lucky opportunity to volunteer for two days demonstrating the spinning chair, a fun physics experiment where a person sits on a chair and starts spinning, and the position of their body can change how fast the chair spins. It is hard to tell who was having the most fun, me or the kids visiting my experiment. For nearly every “What if I spin it like this?” I could simply invite them to find out with a “Why don’t you try it?”, which they would do very eagerly.